Opening this weekend:
Monkey Man--The title character, also known variously as "Kid" and "Bobby," wears an ape mask in the ring in the underground fights from which he ekes out a living. He's a man on a mission; he wants to get close enough to the corrupt officials in the Indian city where he lives who caused the death of his mother and the destruction of his neighborhood when he was a child. In flashback, we see the saintly woman telling him stories of Hanuman, the heroic monkey-god from the Ramayana.
Our hero works his way up from floor-scrubber to waiter in the human-trafficking club where these creeps hang out, and from there, lots of blood-splattered mayhem ensues. Grievously wounded, he finds refuge in a religious community of transgendered people who become his allies against the bad guys.
This is the feature directorial debut of Dev Patel, who also wrote the story, co-wrote the script and stars. Patel, the kid from Slumdog Millionaire, has already shown his badass bona fides in 2018's overlooked, believable thriller The Wedding Guest, among other films, and he's a true action star here too, though he never loses a certain sympathetic callowness.
Other memorable cast members include the Jon Lovitz type Pitobash (known to American audiences from Million Dollar Arm) as the comic relief, gorgeous Ashwini Kalsekar as the sinister boss at the club, Vipin Sharma as the serene leader of the trans order, and Sharlto Copley as the shady fight manager. The standout, however, is Sikandar Kher as the brutal but shrewd police chief; his clashes with the Monkey Man are the high points of the film.
Shot in garish, lurid tones by Sharone Meir and slickly edited to propulsive Indian music, Monkey Man is extremely bloody, to be sure, at least by wide-release standards. I'm not sure that, at its bones, it's anything but a standard revenge tale, in the manner of a spaghetti western; Kid/Bobby/Monkey Man is a classic Man With No Name. But as such, it's helped by a gallery of seriously odious villains that help you invest in the hero's vengeance. Whether it's a healthy feeling or not, it's enormously satisfying every time the Monkey Man lands a punch.
The First Omen--Just a couple of years shy of its half-century mark, the original version of The Omen, enormously influential both on the horror genre and on society in general, is still spawning movies. In this prequel, set in Rome in 1971, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), a young American novice raised in Massachusetts, arrives at a Catholic orphanage and quickly realizes that something is very wrong behind the scenes.
Directed by Arkasha Stevenson, who was also among the screenwriters, this account of the diabolical Damien's nativity has its merits. It starts well, with a setting and a hapless heroine that suggest a tale from Sade. It has a brooding period atmosphere, some nightmarish imagery and sequences, and a cast stocked with veterans like Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Charles Dance and the bassoon-voiced Ralph Ineson as an Irish priest investigating the matter.
It's also potentially interesting on a thematic level, in that the plot to bring the Antichrist into the world, it turns out, is reactionary; deliberately concocted to create a concrete Evil which will drive people away from the rebellious, authority-questioning counterculture of the time and back to the Church. Something provocative could have been done with this idea.
So it's by no means an unintelligent piece of moviemaking. But it's a tiresomely unpleasant movie. The story concerns the effort to find a suitable mother for the little devil, which results in many extended scenes of restrained women groaning and whimpering and pleading and gasping, to a degree that felt to me uncomfortably close to torture porn at times.
It's possible that this movie's non-consensual gynecological and obstetric procedures are reflective of a post-Roe sensibility, and can thus claim political validity. But that doesn't make them any more watchable. Perhaps this First Omen should also be the last Omen.
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